Tag Archives: alternation

The perspective that the study of linguistic data should be driven by studies of individual speaker choices has been the subject of attack from a number of linguists.

The first set of objections have come from researchers who have traditionally focused on linguistic variation expressed in terms of rates per word, or per million words.

No such thing as free variation?

As Smith and Leech (2013) put it: “it is commonplace in linguistics that there is no such thing as free variation” and that indeed multiple differing constraints apply to each term. On the basis of this observation they propose an ‘ecological’ approach, although in their paper this approach is not clearly defined.

(with thanks to Jill Bowie)

Introduction

One of the most controversial arguments in corpus linguistics concerns the relationship between a ‘variationist’ paradigm comparable with lab experiments, and a traditional corpus linguistics paradigm focusing on normalised word frequencies.

Rather than see these two approaches as diametrically opposed, we propose that it is more helpful to view them as representing different points on a methodological progression, and to recognise that we are often forced to compromise our ideal experimental practice according to the data and tools at our disposal.

Viewing these approaches as being represented along a progression allows us to step back from any single perspective and ask ourselves how different results can be reconciled and research may be improved upon. It allows us to consider the potential value in performing more computer-aided manual annotation — always an arduous task — and where such annotation effort would be usefully focused.

The idea is sketched in the figure below.

A methodological progression: from normalised word frequencies to verified alternation.